Richard F. Hoffman Oral History

EW: Okay, good afternoon. My name is Edward B. Williams. I am a military historian. This interview is taking place in the Cold Springs public library in Cold Springs, Texas. The date is 11th February in the year 2003, and the interviewee is Mr. Richard F. Hoffman. Mr. Hoffman’s birth date was 7th January, 1922. He is a veteran of World War II, United States Navy Pacific theatre. His current address is 63 Empire Circle, Cold Springs, Texas, 77331. The highest rank that he attained during World War II was that a Lieutenant Senior grade, United States Navy. I guess maybe that was the United States Naval Reserve.
RH: Naval Reserve, yeah. I didn’t make full lieutenant until later, when I was in the active Reserves. The highest rank I’d in the Navy, in the active duty part, was JD.
EW: While you mention that, did you continue your career in the Reserves, apparently?
RH: Yeah, I stayed in for a number of years. I wish I’d stayed in the whole bit, but—
EW: You didn’t get the retirement in the Naval Reserve—?
RH: No.
EW: —but you were a member of that for some years thereafter?
RH: Yes, uh-hunh (affirmative).
EW: Okay, why don’t you tell us just a little bit about what your life was like in those depression years prior to World War II?
RH: I guess a lot like most everybody else—my father ran a haberdashery store in Seattle, Washington, and finally he had to close it up. We had a sign on the door from the government that he had gone bankrupt. He lost his home and managed to find another one for us, and we went on our way. The interesting part being that we never knew we were poor.
EW: You shared that same fate with millions of other Americans.
RH: Absolutely, sure.
EW: That depression began in ’29. You would’ve been something like—what—8 years old.
RH: —7 years old, yeah.
EW: Then it extended on through the ‘30s.
RH: Yeah.
EW: Only with the advent of World War II did the country begin to come somewhat out of that long depression period. You mentioned that you area native of Seattle, Washington. I’m assuming you attended the public schools there and what have you. Why don’t you just sort of briefly discuss up to the point that you entered World War II in the Navy?
RH: (03:03) Yeah, I was born in Seattle and raised there until I was 15. The job that my father found, after the depression began to recede, took him to Milwaukee, and he moved the family there. While I was in Seattle, I had quite an acquaintance with the water. I’ve been what I call a water person all of my life. I had an older brother who built his first functional sailboat 12 feet long, when he was 14 years old, so he—kind of—introduced me to the ways of the water, and I’m sure that that’s the reason that I joined the Navy and I had the opportunity of going to war.
EW: I can assure you, that having been in Seattle just recently, that those interests still prevail out there. There are a lot of people that are really interested in being right there on the beautiful Puget Sound.
RH: Having had that background as a youngster, it helped me a lot when I got into training in the Navy that I had a lot of basic knowledge about how things worked on ships and boats and so on.
EW: You graduated from public schools there in Seattle?
RH: No, actually I went through 2 years in Seattle and then one year in Milwaukee, and I graduated from Evansville Township High School in Evansville, Illinois. I went to three high schools before it was over.
EW: You moved around a little bit like a lot of depression era people did.
RH: Yeah, the breadwinner went where the opportunity was.
EW: That’s exactly right, and it required a lot of willingness to do things that was not necessarily palatable. You did what you had to do back in that day and age.
RH: I think that had a lot to do with the attitude that all of us had when we went in the war too. It wasn’t really stoicism, but we were willing to accept whatever came our way. If it was hardship, it was hardship, and you did what you needed to do with it.
EW: That’s it.
RH: (04:57) Yeah. We both learned to be ingenious.
EW: Did you enlist or were you drafted?
RH: I think always of these situations like politicians who have been criticized because they got into this or that program and perhaps didn’t find their way into wartime service and so on, but governments have programs, and they made them out so that they can take the greatest advantage of the use of their nation at that time. One of those programs, when I happened along was called B-7.
EW: I’ve heard of it.
RH: It was designed so that those of us that were doing halfway decently in school,—and incidentally were born at the right time—could remain in school if we signed up with the Naval Reserve. They allowed us to finish our undergraduate education and get a degree, provided we were willing to go into training immediately thereafter with the notion that we would—if qualified, we could come out as officers. I just fit. I was born at the right time. I had parents that saw to it that I went to college. They didn’t provide, but they encouraged that kind of thing. It was a combination of my age and the fact that I had a higher education. They pointed me in the direction of being an officer.
EW: What college was that at the time?
RH: I went to Marquette University.
EW: Is that a parochial?
RH: It’s a Jesuit University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
EW: Right, yeah, it’s well-known. I’ve heard of Marquette on many occasions. I think one of their claims to fame was basketball.
RH: (06:43) They were big in basketball, but I went there when they were still playing football. (laughs)
EW: You’re dating yourself. You mentioned the B-7 program. I seem to recall it as a V-12 program. What was that—sort of—a progression of program?
RH: There was a B-12. There was a B-12, a B-5, and a B-7. I remember one of them had to do with airplanes in the Naval Air Force. Ours was surface ship duty. That was the basis for it. The V-12, I honestly can’t remember right now just what it was. I remember that there was one.
EW: Do you remember the Turner?
RH: Yeah, but I don’t remember just what group it focused on. It was all organized, so as we came on at the right time, they had places for us to go, and we went into training. In due time, we were turned out and put to work in some aspect of the Navy’s activities.
EW: When you first entered onto active duty, where did you go?
RH: I graduated from Marquette in 1943 in May, I guess. In August, I went to work in a war plant for a couple of months. Then I got called up. In August, I was sent to Columbia University, which was one of a number of Naval officers’ training schools.
EW: In New York City?
RH: In New York City, yeah, uh-hunh (affirmative). We had a 30-day period there as enlisted men, during which they culled the group a little bit. Then we went in. We were then named as midshipmen and had 3 more months, hence the 90-day wonder appellation that we had.
EW: Was that at Columbia, the 90-day wonder part of it also?
RH: Pardon me?
EW: Was that at Columbia also?
RH: (08:41) Oh, yes. The whole 4 months was there at Columbia.
EW: Okay, so really—and, of course, this is naval service is somewhat different. It’s a type of duty and what have you. You didn’t go through—and you were commissioned—so you didn’t really go through the typical boot camp—sort of—experience that a lot—?
RH: The closest we got to boot camp was during that first 30 days. We wore enlisted uniforms at that time. Of course, there was an extraneous athletic program that went with it, but no, we didn’t have the same experience as guys that went through boot camp.
EW: Not a lot of drilling and that sort of thing?
RH: There was drilling. Yeah, it was—kind of—interesting. There were two big dormitories. I understand they’re still there. One was Fernandez. The other one was Johnson, and between it was a great big field that turned out to be a perfect parade ground. Yeah, we did our share of marching, drilling with wooden makeshift guns and simulation guns, and that sort of thing. Yeah, we did a good bit of that.
EW: You did get the basic dose of military infantry.
RH: Yeah, I was on the seventh deck—as we used to call them then—of this particular building, which was a dormitory. We weren’t allowed to use elevators. We ran up and down and had very rigorous schedules, and so on. It was intense training.
EW: Oh, yeah, I’m sure it was at that particular time. What sort of instructors did you have? Do you remember any of those? Regular Navy—?
RH: Oh, yeah, I can even tell you some of their names, but it wouldn’t make any difference. They were, for the most part, guys that hadn’t been too long out of the school themselves, but for one reason or another, they were retained. They were ensigns and JGs. I remember one lieutenant particularly. It was—kind of—a game. We all knew the rules, and there were demerits, and you didn’t want to get caught. The instructors were not much older than we were, but they knew where they were in the thing, and we knew where they were too.
EW: You really didn’t have a lot of regular Navy personnel training at that time.
RH: No, this is Naval Reserve stuff, and as we go a little further into this, well, I think we’ll discover that the entire destroyer escort program, of which I became part, was a Naval Reserve operation, with a few exceptions.
EW: As I’ve already mentioned, you served in World War II. Where exactly did you go, following your completion of the OCS program?
RH: (11:17) Well, I was—I said to you earlier that I had some preliminary with things of the sea and water and whatnot. I surprised myself and everybody else. I did extremely well while I was there at OCS, and as a consequence, I was given a choice of a number of places to go for training. One of those choices was 6 months in Florida training as an anti-submarine worker specialist.
EW: ASW—they call it now.
RH: Yeah, so I jumped on that, and I was granted that.
EW: You went from Columbia—you were assigned to the ASW program.
RH: I had a couple of weeks off and went home to Milwaukee, and then reported down in Miami, where sub chaser training school—I guess it was.
EW: Okay and how long were you in training down there? Do you remember?
RH: Between there and some time in Key West, I think there was—well, let’s see, I got out in November. I was commissioned in November, and I went to the ship in about April, so it was all in between that time. It was 5 months, at least.
EW: November of ’43 to April ’44, thereabouts?
RH: Thereabouts when I was commissioned. It was—they kept us busy with this fairly sophisticated equipment and so on, but they didn’t make engineers out of us. We just learned to operate it.
EW: Upon completion of that, what was your MOS, or job assignment, more or less?
RH: (12:54) As I look back on it, it was a real well-coordinated program, and we just—kind of—flowed out of midshipman school into the anti-submarine warfare training process. Before we got out of that, we were already assigned to a nucleus crew. In this case, the ships that we went to were just our escorts, because while we were in the human assets—so to speak—we were being trained. They were building these destroyer escorts like crazy—some 563 of them—I guess—got built in a matter of a year and a half.
EW: Then they were turning those things out in a couple of days, I believe.
RH: Well, not quite, but it seemed like it.
EW: They were doing that with delivery ships—you know.
RH: Yeah, the destroyer escorts—I have seen the data on how long it took to put one together—maybe 4 or 5 months—something like that. There were a number of shipyards, including Orange down here in Texas and up in Carney. They were all around the country. They were turning these things out. The reason, of course, was to do something quickly about the German submarine warfare, which was taking a devastating toll on our shipping across the Atlantic at this point in the war.
EW: Yeah, and even in the Gulf of Mexico.
RH: Yeah, they were everywhere. During my training in Miami, I remember doing sentry duty on the beach—the Atlantic beaches there at night. We’d get assigned, and we’d have to walk the beaches. What we were doing was looking for lights out on the Atlantic.
EW: I know—I’ve seen maps of—for example—I was showing you Samuel Eliot Morison—one volume of his history of Naval operations World War II. There is a one-volume abridgement of that entitled Two-Ocean War, and it has—among many other illustrations—it has a map to show submarine U-Boat sinking along the coast—
RH: Sure.
EW: —the Eastern gulf coast of the United States and it’s absolutely amazing how many ships were sunk right within the sight of our shores.
RH: I really don’t think that the civilian population in the country was very much aware of that.
EW: Yeah, right off the mouth of the Mississippi River, for example, or right outside. I once met a guy that had been a radio officer on a merchant ship. He had received his training at one of the other merchant training schools—radio schools—I think up in the New York area. He related to me that the first ship he joined, they sailed—departed from Sandy Hook and were almost immediately torpedoed. Because of the urgency of the time—you know—sometimes training, once it’s completed, there should be aircrafts that didn’t take off or whatever, but there he was. He told me he was frantically reading the manual about how to operate the battery-operated transmitter, so he could transmit an SOS—just right off the New York harbor there.
RH: Yeah, I’m sure.
EW: Could you tell us a little bit—at this point, it might be an appropriate place here—about the destroyer escort. They’re smaller than a destroyer.
RH: (16:05) Yeah, I’d really like to. I learned a lot about them, much more in recent years than I ever knew when I was sailing on one. It was a well-thought through program to provide ships that were a little smaller than destroyers, but they were light on their feet, so to speak, and they were not heavily armed, as far as aircraft and surface warfare was concerned, but they had what was state of the art anti-submarine gear,—
EW: Sonar and etcetera, etcetera
RH: —which then was sonar and an array of about three different kinds of weapons for trying to blow these submarines under water.
EW: Depth charges and—
RH: Depth charges and a ahead-thrown gear that the little rocket things would send out an array of 30 or 40 of the small bombs, and they dropped in a circle over the submarine.
EW: Is that like the wire arrangement sometimes you see?
RH: A wire arrangement was depth charges. The depth charges were preset and exploded according to the depth setting that you put on them, and they were effective if you got close enough to the submarine, but they threw an awful lot of explosives over for the one time you get a submarine. The ahead-thrown—I’m saying ahead—a-h-e-a-d—thrown weapons were mounted on the foredeck, and then they were sent off in a pattern. They were much smaller—the charges were—and when they fell, they didn’t designate unless they hit the submarine. There was a real solid reason for that. In the first place, they were easier to build, and they didn’t cost as much. On the other hand, every time you add an explosion, you might as well quit pinging for the submarine, because there was so much turbulence in the water that you would get echoes back from the turbulence. The submarine could slip out of the way of the turbulence, and you’d lost them. If it didn’t blow up unless it hit them, you never had your search interrupted, and could generally keep pinging on the hull of the submarine and throw another barrage at him.
EW: That’s generally a forward-looking sort of a situation with sonar?
RH: (18:23) The sonar swept. The sonar gear was under the forward part of the ship, about a third of the way from the bow and stern, roughly.
EW: Clocking with dome arrangement, I guess, in a hole.
RH: We had a dome, actually, that extended down from the hull—from the keel of the ship, and when it was down there, it could go to 360 degrees.
EW: Really?
RH: What you did—yeah, in fact, that was the standard operating procedure was to cause that thing to swing from side to side, at least through 180 degrees as you were moving through the water.
EW: As you move forward, right.
RH: You’d have several of these destroyers, of course, working together. Their ping area would overlap and would have, in effect, a continuous search of a mile or more, and just sweep where you thought the submarine was going to be.
EW: Yes and the sonar could generally establish the depth at which the target was located, and that’s how you knew the sub was charted.
RH: (19:20) It was absolutely primitive compared to what we do now. At that time, it was pretty sophisticated. We had a pretty good idea of depth, yeah, although that could be affected by the warmth of the water and layers of different temperatures in the water and so on, but we had a fair idea of depth. We had a good idea of direction, because you’d hear the—and then even today, you hear of pinging, as far as our efforts to learn about the Doppler effect. We’d ping at one tone, and when it comes back, if the tone is higher, than the object is coming—you’re getting closer to it. If it is lower than you’re in a lengthening range and so on.
We knew where they were pretty well actually, as far as that direction was concerned. We could make a combination of soundings and find out what the track plotted, and then know just what their course of speed was and so on. Then your objective was to get your own ship headed a little bit ahead of them with enough elapsed time, so that when you threw your weapons over the bow, he would drive right into them when they got to his depth.
EW: Primarily, the destroyer escort would probably be the extreme outer fringe of a defensive formation for—say, for a task force.
RH: The escorts had an interesting career, because the early ones all went to the Atlantic. In fact, they are credited by historians today for eliminating the submarine threat. They worked in wolf packs with—what we called—CVEs that were little escort carriers. Everybody called then postage stamp carriers. There would be a CVE and cluster of destroyers. Of course, they would go out on their own, and find submarines and destroy them. The other thing they did was act as screens for the big convoys that were running back and forth across the Atlantic. About half way through the way—I guess—the submarines were conquered, with a few exceptions. We actually eliminated that as the dire threat that it was earlier in the war, so now, they had all these ships 306 feet long and pretty shallow. The idea was that torpedoes would go under us. They didn’t always, but that was the notion, and so we all got sent over to the Pacific. Well, I didn’t get into the active part of things until most of the Atlantic naval war was over, so I went directly to the Pacific.
EW: I wasn’t aware of that, so were actually involved in anti-submarine warfare in the Atlantic, prior to going to the Pacific?
RH: No, our ship wasn’t built in time. We didn’t get out until 1944, and the submarine threat was pretty well caught by that time.
EW: By that time, that had been pretty well done.
RH: We never went into the Atlantic. We were built at the Pacific coast at Best Steel yard in San Francisco, and we went directly from San Francisco into the Pacific. A lot of my experience—which was one 15-month war cruise—we called it—and then a second post-war cruise over to the orient. All of that occurred in the Pacific.
EW: You mentioned CVs and those anti-submarine war configurations. Those were small carrier-type aircraft, and they carried aircraft.
RH: (22:59) They were merchantman, but they weren’t.
EW: Were they?
RH: Yeah.
EW: What kind of aircraft did they have aboard?
RH: Well, they had only a handful to begin with, and I really can’t tell you precisely what they were, but—
EW: They are the ones that would fly out and—
RH: Yeah, and they were equipped to—if they could find a submarine, they were equipped to drop on it—torpedoes and so on.
EW: Or let you know—
RH: They also did search form. Subs, in those days, couldn’t stay underwater very long.
EW: Yeah, they were diesel electric.
RH: They were diesel electric, and they needed oxygen, so for most of the war, they had to surface at night. Also, they were extremely limited, as far as their speed under water. If they ran 8 knots under water, we were told that they could only run for an hour or more. If they ran at 3 knots, they run for maybe a half a day or so. That was part of the tactic for getting them, was to stay with them until they had exhausted their oxygen, and they had to surface. That is what our 3-inch guns were for was to shoot at them when they surfaced.
EW: Once they surfaced?
RH: (24:02) Yeah.
EW: A destroyer escort designated DE—I’ve always had the impression that those things were—you mentioned—like they were 305 feet long?
RH: Three hundred and six feet long—yeah—most of them were. The first ones were a little shorter than that in length.
EW: That is probably—what—three-quarters of the size of a DD destroyer?
RH: Fletcher class destroyers were 365 feet, as I recall.
EW: The same size?
RH: No, they were 60 feet longer.
EW: A little more heavily armed—I guess?
RH: Oh, yeah, totally. As ships grow in length, they grew exponentially in width and depth and weight and so on.
EW: With regard to armament and that sort of thing?
RH: Yes. Well, none of the destroyers, of course, had any armor on them. They were built to go fast and as fast as they could go, in any event, and they weren’t protected the way battleships were, that has 12-inch plates of steel on their sides and that sort of thing at the waterline—none of that. The destroyers were part of the surface warfare fleet. They were designed to go in and literally blow other ships out of the water, and hence their name. They had a long history of that.
EW: They were nimble.
RH: (25:26) They used the destroyer escort—I’m not sure why they hung the word destroyer on it, to be honest with you, because we didn’t have near the fire power that the destroyer did, and we didn’t have the speed. We did escort duty, and somehow or another we got the destroyer escort. We were under Des Pac, which was destroyer Pacific, as far as our role of command was concerned. We were the smallest major war vessel in the Navy at that time.
EW: —in the navy at that time?
RH: Yeah.
EW: Well—you know—I’ve read accounts of invasions, both in Europe, Italy, and particularly in the Pacific, where destroyers and DE’s could get in there close enough where they could offer close ground support from the main batteries.
RH: There was a certain amount of shore bombardment. The destroyers did that, because they were carrying—the Fletcher class and had five five-inch guns on them that were coordinated and had good fire control. They used them for shore bombardment extensively in the island hopping in the Pacific. The destroyer escorts didn’t have that kind of fire power.
EW: Once you completed your training in Florida, where did you go from there? I’m assuming it is San Francisco.
RH: They were building ships all around the country and at various bases. In our case, the one at Norfolk was gathering people together to form—what they called—nucleus crews. Before I ever got out of the training in Florida, they had already assigned me to a nucleus crew for the Destroyer Escort 643, which was the Damon Cummings. I went directly at another leave—a week or two—and then I went to Norfolk to join the men who were going to sail with me when the ship was commissioned. It’s interesting, I’ve read accounts of many of these destroyer escorts and got active with the historical escort sailor association, and they all tell us in one story, because the program was so well coordinated that it was—the steps were all the same.
If we were officers, we went through training—like Columbia or other schools. Notre Dame was doing it and a number of others. Then we went and got some specialized training, if you’re going to be in the gunnery gang or in the engineering group, whatnot—they sent you off to specialized schools. Then we found our way to the nucleus crew. There were about a hundred or so in that nucleus crew, and about—maybe—ten officers. We trained together out there—got to know each other. Then they all had the famous train trip from wherever they were training to the ship, which was a nightmare in everybody’s case.
EW: Tell me a little bit about that.
RH: (28:09) Well, they moved us around on—what we called—cattle cars. They weren’t much bigger than cattle cars, and they had bunks that were rigged taut-wise in them, and they were about three or four high. They were giving business to all the railroads. The one we took from the Atlantic coast to San Francisco—there were seven different railroads that got piece of the action on that, so we were sidelined all the time. It took us 5 days—I guess—to get across the United States. As an officer, I was only granted 4, so I lost a day of pay on that.
EW: You talk about a nucleus crew maybe of a hundred. What was the total crew common on that?
RH: When we went to sea, we had about—there were close to 220 of us—maybe 215.
EW: That many on a DE?
RH: Yeah, and it wasn’t bad. It was pretty good like that.
EW: It looks like that would be pretty crowded to me.
RH: All naval ships during World War II were crowded. They carried crews that were far in excess of what a merchantman would.
EW: Yeah, well, they have a combat mission, so there is going to be—
RH: Well, they had to stand three watches, and they had to be able to man everything all at once, so there was a lot of—if it was just the operation of the ship, we’d had done it with half that size or maybe less.
EW: Yeah, that’s what is interesting, because I’ve served on American flag merchant vessels. I was on the radio and then eventually an electronics officer. I’ve been on vessels as big as 212,000 dead weight ton—a huge ship—and we’ve got 21 men on there. Of course, it’s all a different mission and what have you.
RH: (29:52) Sure.
EW: These things were—like 1,000 feet long or thereabouts.
RH: Oh, sure.
EW: You’re talking about a 360—
RH: Yeah, most of that technology, the telemetry that made all of that possible, was not available back in those days, but the main thing is we had to have enough men to fight the ship.
EW: Yeah, a totally different mission. Anyway, I was also under the impression if we were aboard in Norfolk, right—?
RH: She wasn’t. The ship was in San Francisco. We were just trained there.
EW: You were trained at Norfolk, okay.
RH: Some training in Norfolk, yeah, and then we got put on this train, all hundred of us and spent 5 days in lousy traveling conditions—
EW: —on the cattle cars.
RH: —on the cattle cars and morale was lousy.
EW: I bet.
RH: There are some stories that go with that, but it is fun to think of them, but anyhow, we found our way out to Oakland. Then they put us in boats and took us across to San Francisco where the ship was close to being finished.
EW: You made an entire transcontinental flight—rather trip—on a cattle car that arrived in the San Francisco Bay area and joined you vessel out there.
RH: (30:59) A lot of the senior members of the crew—the chiefs who had a lot of experience—all but one or two of them, I guess, and all of the officers traveled independently over. I got the nod, because I was the junior officer, and so I got to be in charge of the train.
EW: How nice. With that experience you wouldn’t—
RH: (laughs) When we get together at these reunions, we have a great time talking about that train trip across the country.
EW: I’ve talked to other veterans with regard to the same thing. I was talking to an Eighth Air Force veteran, and he was placed in charge of a similar detail. During the course of that trip from X to Y there, he said, “A lot of them just disappeared.”
RH: All sorts of things happened.
EW: He had no way to control that, and then try to explain it when they got there. He thought he was going to end up court marshaled, but it worked out okay. You arrived in San Francisco. About when was that—along in the spring of ’44?
RH: Yeah, it was in the spring of 1944, and then we were there several weeks while the ship was completed. Then one day we all got onboard in our dress blues and white hats and had the commissioning ceremony. I still have the document at home listing all of us who were there at that commissioning at Bethlehem Steel shipyard. We took the ship out for the first time and did some basic maneuvering and then took her down to San Diego, where there was another facility which ran the shakedown crews, and we spent our time in shakedown down there, which is just what the name implies. We exercised the ship. We exercised the crew. There is a lot of basic training in it.
EW: Correct the malfunctions?
RH: Sure, anything that wasn’t done right in the shipyard, you could have a change to correct it.
EW: Right.
RH: (32:47) It seemed that that shakedown was several weeks.
EW: Yeah, I would say so, and then you’ve got to go back to the yard and try to get all of that straightened out.
RH: Right, and then we went to sea.
EW: Then you headed out. Did you go as part of a convoy or did you strike out on your own?
RH: We were sent to Hawaiian islands first, and we simply went by ourselves. The eastern Pacific—in other words—not anything much to be afraid of over there in that part of the world, so we sailed by ourselves to the Hawaiian islands—stopped there for a little while—picked up some more crew and some more officers.
EW: Did you—as a matter of safety—follow the wartime procedures zigzagging? Do you remember? Of course, you’ve got to ID—
RH: Now, we (laughs)—I don’t know whether I mentioned this while the camera was running or not, but most of these destroyers were manned at 98 percent by reserve personnel, including the officers. Most of the time, however, there was an Annapolis man as the skipper.
EW: Regular Navy?
RH: In our course, we had a regular Navy skipper, and we had a regular Navy exec. They both had gone to Annapolis—had left the Navy for awhile to pursue their careers, and then they were called back when the war occurred. Our particular skipper at that time was a nice guy. He was an advocacy lawyer by profession, but he was a by-the-book guy—a real stickler, so we did everything exactly right. We were the last ship to take our ties off after we got passed. All the other ships were going by with open collars, and we still had our black ties on.
EW: It sounds like your skipper might have been the Patton of the United States Navy.
RH: Well, he was a decent chap. He wasn’t a hard-nosed guy at all, but he was a by-the-book guy. The poor fellow had been a member of the crew of the WASP when it was sunk down at the Coral Sea. He was deadly fearful of submarines. Why they ever made Captain Milliken the skipper of an anti-submarine vessel I’ll never know but—
EW: He definitely had had experience with—
RH: (35:07) Yeah, and he was mortally afraid of them. Up in Okinawa—that’s where we were sent—bless his heart—we were in the middle of kamikaze attacks. At that time I was acting as combat information center officer. That was my battle station, and I had voice-powered phones that were connected to his. His was on the bridge above me. I’d said, “Captain, we’ve got a bogie coming in at such-and-such a bearing and such-and-such a range.” I can still remember him saying, “Damn it, Hoffman, forget the kamikazes.” Where are the submarines?”
EW: Where are the submarines?
RH: “Where are the submarines?” yeah.
EW: He was obsessed.
RH: Yeah.
EW: He was the Captain Queeg.
RH: Well, he was a nice guy. He wasn’t a Captain Queeg. He was a good fellow. He just had had a terrible experience. He was in the water a long time before he was rescued after the submarine sunk him down there.
EW: Yes, and that was a very definite and distinct thread. I don’t know what the figures are, with regard to tonnage subs, but I know those Japanese submarines sunk awful lot of American tonnage, including warships during the course of the war.
RH: We were vulnerable to them up there in that area, but there weren’t too many of them left. That was the fortunate thing about our experience.
EW: Well, then from Hawaii you proceeded where?
RH: We had various assignments, either patrolling shipping lanes or convoying ships back and forth. We spent a number of months in the central and south Pacific. Just I often think, during those months, the Pacific Ocean had no other side, as far as we were concerned. We just spent our time among these islands out there.
EW: Was that just generally by yourself, on your own, or was that in conjuncture with other vessels?
RH: (36:55) Sometimes we would work with other ships in the division. There were six ships in the division, arranging from the 639 through the 644—I guess. Anyhow—or whatever that comes out to—but most of our time—or a large part of it—we were just operating by ourselves.
EW: —there among those islands. I guess you were looking for some possible submarine presence.
RH: Yeah, we did that all the time. We always pinged for submarines, even when we were just running.
EW: Then, finally as the war began to reach its final phases, how about the Okinawa campaign? Did you have anything to do with the Hiroshima campaign?
RH: No, our war was Okinawa. After we had done this duty in the Central Pacific, they began the marshal the armada that went to Okinawa. Armada is the right word. There were thousands of ships involved in that thing.
EW: Like Task Force 58 or something?
RH: Well, much, much more than that. At the end, to pull that thing together, we found ourselves getting into anti-aircraft training, and we got buzzed by our own aircraft to show us what it was like. We wouldn’t have had a prayer of shooting one of those guys down. One would come in over the bow, and we get everything aimed at him. The next thing, somebody will holler, “Look over your port quarter,” and here comes another one, and nothing was aimed at him. We realized we weren’t really anti-aircraft.
EW: You weren’t really capable. I guess probably when you finally got there though, the fact that—and I guess the Japanese kamikaze capability was somewhat limited. Also, generally—obviously, not always—they were after those carriers more than anything else.
RH: (38:45) No, they were after the destroyers.
EW: Really?
RH: Yeah.
EW: Well, I would be the defense.
RH: There were two lines of defense. When all the ships were in where your father was, I believe. You said, there at Bunker Bay, they were discharging personnel and material on the beach to support the war that was going on—and a horrible war on the island. We had an inner ring of destroyer escorts, which were there, presumably, to try to catch a submarine that might try to come in, but more practically, it was anti-aircraft. Then there was an outer ring, and that was manned largely by the destroyers.
EW: Pickets, I think they were called.
RH: Picket ships—they were called, exactly. We had the two rings that went out—like semicircles to protect that harbor—thousands of ships literally involved in the harbor there—just milling around, waiting to be attacked. The Japanese focused more on the destroyers, because the destroyers were more likely to shoot them. Our anti-aircraft—we didn’t have very good fire control, for example. We had a lot of really diligent fellows firing those guns, but they didn’t have much help on the technical side really.
EW: You were actually in the invasion armada?
RH: We spent more time than any of the six ships of our division up there at Okinawa. We were there for 30 days from the night of the invasion, which was the night before Easter which happened to be April Fool’s Day, until 30 days after that. We then were sent to escort a damaged cruiser—a cruiser that had been struck by a kamikaze.
EW: They called it—I guess it was called “Ulithi Mog Mog,” I’ve heard him refer to it.
RH: Well, there was a town on it or something—I think—called Mog Mog. Yeah, there was. Then we turned around and went back up for another 15 days, so we had 45 days under those kamikaze attacks up there, more than any of our other ships, because we—and there were only two of us that weren’t hit.
EW: Out of your division?
RH: Most war ships had some—kind of—now, they weren’t sunk, but they had some—kind of—damage. We didn’t get any damage. We called ourselves a lucky ship.
EW: Could you comment just a little bit about what viewers that might be looking at this in the future that really don’t know what kamikazes were?
RH: (41:16) Oh, yeah. In this day and time, of course, we think about what is going on in Iraq and then Israel and the suicides over there. In many respects, it was the same attitude by the people that were running things. They recruited and trained a bunch of pilots and used the last of their aircraft on this desperation mission. We were lead to believe that these young men were brought out in the morning and given their last cup of Saki and sent to their aircraft with only enough gas to get one way, and that was from Japan, where they were down to Okinawa, where we were. Their mission was simply to get a ship in the sites of their aircraft and to drive the aircraft into it.
EW: They were loaded with explosives?
RH: Yeah, sure, but they were not the only ones. We had—well, I’ll put it this way. They had suicide version of virtually every kind of weapon you could think of. They had those submarines that they—what they did was take a weapon, make it large enough to put a human in. The human drove the thing, because they didn’t have computers to drive it—like we do today. The human brain was the control on that particular weapon, so they flew in things—like I saw the picture of the Baka Braun they showed me here earlier. They had suicide small boats—speed boats, we’d call them. They would have swimmers. They would drag a mine up against the hull of your ship and designate it.
EW: Just total fanaticism?
RH: Oh, yeah. Just before the war ended, they actually had some aircraft they built out of wood and fabric that only went about 120 miles and hour. They put explosives in the nose of those and sent a few of them down.
EW: Okay, Dick, let me interrupt you for a moment here. I noticed you’re—is this light bothering you and you’d like to stop and take a break?
RH: No, I’m fine. It’s in my eyes, but—
EW: Okay, I’m afraid that it might be irritating to you. We can certainly take a break at any time you wish for a drink of water or whatever.
RH: (43:39) You be the judge. I’m fine.
EW: This is not that formal, by any means. Tell us a little bit about the kamikaze attacks that you experienced.
RH: They came in waves.
EW: Squadrons of them?
RH: Yeah, they’d send a whole bunch of them down. Their strategy seemed to be to send a few isolated aircraft down at night. You have to visualize this thing as this great big open harbor alongside the central part of the island, and all of that harbor was full of ships—all kinds of ships.
EW: That’s like that picture in the Morison book that I showed you—wall-to-wall ships.
RH: Yeah, it showed how close together they were. They got flares on us and lit us up. The ships were still underway, and when we got flares on us, we would make smoke. We all had smoke generators on the sterns of ships, and so we would cover the harbor with smoke. Then we couldn’t see each other. We would mill around at 3 or 4 knots all night long. I happened to be in the middle of that, because I was the command of information center officer, and my job was to interpret the radar, figure out where the closest ships were going and what speed they were traveling and tell the skipper what to do. We did that for hours at night, just avoiding collisions with our own ships.
EW: A lot of those kamikaze attacks were at night under a lot of flares?
RH: No, they weren’t. They didn’t use the kamikazes at night. They just kept us up all night. Then at dawn, you could expect a wave of kamikaze aircraft.
EW: That’s right, you said—
RH: (45:31) They would come sweeping down from the north right over the harbor.
EW: Yeah, you said early noon and then later in the afternoon.
RH: Most of the times, there was a significant wave of them at dawn and again at dusk, for obvious reasons. The sun gets in your eyes and that sort of thing. At noon, they would send other aircraft in, not necessarily kamikaze.
EW: You had mentioned prior, when we were talking before this interview began that the flares were really just irritants to keep you awake.
RH: I think what they wanted to do was keep us awake all night, and they succeeded, because we needed to make smoke, and that meant we had to all really get on the alert to keep from running into each other.
EW: Exactly. Yeah, I misunderstood you there.
RH: Well, and I didn’t make it that clear really.
EW: All the pictures I’ve ever seen,—and I’ve seen a lot of pictures of kamikaze attacks—but they were made during the day. There are some very dramatic—and they say you tend to see the same ones over and over again. There were literally thousands of attacks.
RH: When they came in and they broke formation, then it was really total chaos, because they had no pattern—like an ordinary attack aircraft. You could anticipate what a torpedo bomber was going to do, or you could anticipate what a fighter plane was going to do, but these guys, you never knew what they were going to do. They just would peel and try to find something to run into, so it was total chaos. I have give credit where credit is due. We had a sometimes-effective four-barrel automatic gun on the ship. It was a 1.1, and that was the gun that shot down our kamikaze, as we call it.
EW: You got one?
RH: We got one, yeah. It attacked us, and we were able to shoot it down before it hit us. The reason I like to tell the story is, because with all of us guys with all of our specialized training, the fellow that was in charge of the gun crew was our supply officer—Jim Wood. Bless his heart, I got an email from him just the other day. He was in charge of that gun, and he saw the thing disappear into a cloud. He told the guys on the crew, he said, “Watch that cloud. When it comes out, don’t wait for me, you just open fire.”
EW: You said was a quad-barrel? Was it a 40-millimeter?
RH: (48:00) No, it wasn’t. The 40s were pretty reliable guns.
EW: Is that—like a compound gun?
RH: Yes, sort of. It was four barrel. I’ve forgotten. I think it was a broker’s gun.
EW: It had like a muzzle—like a funnel—maybe that’s the feed or something like that?
RH: They had the feed V-shaped—
EW: —for the ammo.
RH: —for the ammo, yeah. You had to feed all four of these barrels. The about it is that it was very erratic. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t work. We weren’t real happy to have it on our ship. We’d rather had the 40.
EW: Then you had that 20 millimeter?
RH: Oh, we had a bunch of 20s.
EW: Those things probably fired explosives. You know—that was the primary weapon on a lot of those German fighter planes. They carried those 20s.
RH: They packed a wallop.
EW: Oh, they fired explosive shell. They would explode upon contact.
RH: (48:54) You could see them when they exploded at the end of their trajectory. My battle station was inside, so I couldn’t see the combat. I didn’t see the kamikaze that attacked us, but I used to judge the degree of peril by the—kind of—guns we were firing. If we fired the 3-inch I didn’t worry.
EW: They were way off.
RH: They were way off, and we weren’t going to hit them anyhow, and if that 1.1 starting going then I thought, “Uh-oh, something is headed our way.” Then, when the 20s began, I began to say, “There’s really something on deck.”
EW: You probably even had some 50s.
RH: Well, the 50s were the last resort—a couple of 50s up on the bridge. You’d hear those go off— (laughs)
EW: —and that was it. You mentioned picking up a kamikaze’s body in the water?
RH: Yeah, we were out on patrol, and somebody spotted this body, and we were given orders to go over and pick the body up. I was up on the bridge at the time, but by the time they got him on the quarter deck, I was down there to see what was going on, but couldn’t see what was going on. All of us—you know—had the same reaction, “This is just another young kid that got busted to duty.”
EW: He was just a young Japanese boy, more or less?
RH: Yeah, we’ve heard all of the legions about them, but the only part of it that really seemed to be accurate was that he was indeed dressed in black and had a black uniform on.
EW: Maybe the band around his fore—maybe not in the water.
RH: I remember the band.
EW: Well, you remember. You’ve seen pictures of them where they have some sort of prayer band or symbolic band around their head.
RH: When he started out, I’m sure that he did.
EW: He had a picture of a young girl, you said, in his wallet?
RH: Yeah, the thing that we remarked at, when we went through his wallet, why it could’ve been anybody—any American guy’s wallet too. There was a picture of a young woman in there that clearly, he was just another guy that got caught up in the horror of it all.
EW: —and had been trained in that sort of activity and in the service of the emperor.
RH: He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, I guess, and just got swept up in that thing. Everything was desperation at the end of the war for the Japanese. They were running out of everything—all their aircraft. Their Navy was virtually gone, which, of course, brings us to the Amato story. I don’t know whether you want to talk about it or not.
EW: Did you see that—the armada?
RH: (52:15) No, I didn’t see it.
EW: I might mention, before you comment, is that is the last battleship that the Japanese built. It was the largest in the world. (Unintelligible.)
RH: It was the greatest ship they had. The way we got involved in it, one afternoon, I was handed a decoded message, and I read it and gulped a couple of times, because we were told that the Amato, with a task group of—I think it was—three or four cruisers and maybe half a dozen or more destroyers—was headed down our way. It had left Japan, and the notion was that it was going to be a super suicide mission. They were just going to come into that harbor where all those thousands of ships were, and shoot and anything until they got killed.
EW: They had huge guns—16-inch guns.
RH: Oh, yeah, they were 16-inch guns on the armada, I understand. I went to bed that nights, and that was one of the few nights that I was really fearful. I think I mentioned once before to you that a lot of our fear was unfounded, because in this case, as it will appear, it was unfounded. When I hit the sack that night, I didn’t do much sleeping, because all I could think of was that I was going to be awakened by the tumult of the guns and everything breaking loose in the harbor at dawn. What the people who sent us the message didn’t bother to tell us, is that we had a major taskforce of our own up there—one of the main carrier taskforce—and it was in between Okinawa and Japan. Indeed they went over and intercepted the Armada, and sank her and sank the cruisers and a few of the destroyers.
EW: That pretty well ended the Japanese naval trip.
RH: (53:03) That was it. We were always mad at the guy that sent that message out that afternoon, that he didn’t even tell us that we had our own people up there that were going to attack them.
EW: When the war ended, you were in Okinawa?
RH: Yeah, I was in Okinawa when the bomb dropped. Then we had the transition back into peacetime steaming when none of us wanted to turn the lights on at night because we didn’t trust the Japanese.
EW: Did you proceed to the home islands or—?
RH: Yeah, we got to go up there. We went into Tokyo Bay about a week after the signing of it.
EW: Which is the twelfth of September or something like that?
RH: Thereabouts, yeah. I’ve forgotten the exact date. The thing that made me mad is I had the flu, and I only got a couple of days onshore. They were smart enough to tell us not to wear our side arms when we went onshore, but it was still an extremely interesting experience. Obviously, the great areas—blocks and blocks and blocks were nothing but chimneys were standing and so on, where our big bombs had done that. It took a moment to realize that it was once populated there. That was in Tokyo.
EW: Did you encounter any hostilities from civilians you encountered?
RH: No, that’s the thing about the discipline in that—kind of—a government. The people—we had been advised not to try to make any real contacts or anything, but we walked through the streets, and there would be little groups of people standing on the street corner. Then we were particularly concerned for it. The children were just the children of the world. They were just like our children. They came up and they wanted chum gum.
EW: Already?
RH: Yeah.
EW: Within days?
RH: They’d hang around us begging, with a big grin on their face—just like all of our children—similar.
EW: Oriental children are beautiful children—all of them.
RH: (54:56) You had to—there was so much to comprehend in seeing a nation that had been pummeled like that that had been with the tremendous power of our military.
EW: Our military capabilities and what have you—I’ll tell you. Then I guess you—did you proceed back to the—?
RH: We got sent back, yeah, and we broke out our homecoming pennant, which you’re probably familiar with. It was about two-thirds the length of the ship, flying on the masthead. Everybody cheers when you go by.
EW: Did you go by San Francisco?
RH: We went back to Seattle and went into Bremerton there for an overhaul.
EW: That’s where my dad returned, to Bremerton.
RH: Uh-hunh (affirmative). Well, we were in one of the big grading docks, along with three other ships.
EW: Somewhere along there is my dad’s sea bag with a bunch of Japanese armament that he was bringing. I guess they were told to get rid of that stuff. He said he just dumped it into Puget Sound. He got home with a couple of burial vases. Okinawa is just—
RH: —riddled with caves.
EW: Yeah, well, that and these two burial things. They have these little urns.
RH: (56:09) That’s where the kings were—yeah, a lot of them.
EW: The only thing I have from his World War II service is a lot of photographs of Okinawa during that time, are those two burial urns. I’m going to pass those on to our children or museum or whatever is appropriate.
RH: I suppose the museums would be anxious to have them. I was able to get a cup and saucer from the officer’s club of the naval base in Tsingtao. They were quite delicate, compared with the crockery we had onboard our ships and our good steady stuff.
EW: Just briefly, Dick, let me ask you. You know—you spent all that time aboard this vessel without being able to get ashore. How did you handle that? Did it work out all right for you? Was the food good?
RH: Oh you mean—our regular, while we were cruising?
EW: Oh, yeah, life onboard.
RH: That’s a good question. There are two aspects in naval service, and one of them is running the ship and the other one is fighting it. I found running the ship—I mean—when we were devoting our time to operating the ship, I found that quite interesting and enjoyed it thoroughly.
EW: You became the executive officer?
RH: After we left—for awhile we were in Bremerton. The exec was sent back home, and he named me—I guess. I think he is the one who counseled it. Then I became the exec. I got back off leave, and I was the exec. I was part of the second crews.
EW: With the combat phase, you were a combat information center?
RH: Well, during the first cruise, the 15-month cruise—the war cruise you could call it—I had a variety of duties. They were in communications and—
EW: Yeah, you didn’t have just one duty on any naval vessel.
RH: (57:58) No, and I was originally the anti-submarine warfare officer. I was the guy that they looked to run the attacks on submarines. Even though I was the junior officer onboard, that gave me a certain amount of clout in the thing. I had all kinds of collateral duties and went on up through the communications department of the division.
EW: When you returned to the States, how long was it before you were relieved from active duty?
RH: Well, after I became exec, we made another cruise out to the orient—a post-war cruise. We went down to Vietnam or what was then PRC, China. We were serving as a flagship for—are you running out of time?
EW: No, go ahead.
RH: —where our mission was to provide a place for this trapper who was in charge of an armada, a flotilla of LSTs. Most of the people in the United States didn’t know it, but immediately after the war, of course, we went down to south China and brought out of the thousands and thousands of Chinese nationalist groups up the coast and put them in a sink tower to fight the Communists. That had already started, and we happened to be the flagship for the guy that was running that Potella of Elestege, so we went down to the French end of China. Of course, it’s another story, but it was a very interesting part of things.
EW: Yeah, and of course, the Communists eventually—by 1949—had the trial and taken over China. They came to China.
RH: After several months over there, my relief showed up, and I was transferred off ship. I came back on a transport.
EW: Yeah, we are drawing to a close here, so let me just ask you very briefly to state what your career was, basically after the war. I know you became a lawyer, so apparently you—
RH: Well, I stayed in law, and I was admitted to the bar in Wisconsin, but people ask about what the effect of the war years were on you. About the only thing it really did for me was delay my entry into the business world. By the time I got out of law school, there were two or three waves of brand new lawyers who had been turned out. All of the firms were all loaded up. They wouldn’t even talk to you if you weren’t from the Ivy league. That’s part of that, so I went into general business and did a variety of things. My main emphasis, if I may say so, was just to raise a family, and that’s what we did.
EW: Okay, Dick, I think we’re going to wrap it up here. It looks like we’ve come to the end of this tape. On behalf of the Library of Congress, I’d like to thank you very much, and personally I’d like to thank you very much for your World War II service. You have my gratitude and certainly my respect. Thank you very much.
RH: Thank you. I enjoyed it.
EW: Great.

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EW: Okay, good afternoon. My name is Edward B. Williams. I am a military historian. This interview is taking place in the Cold Springs public library in Cold Springs, Texas. The date is 11th February in the year 2003, and the interviewee is Mr. Richard F. Hoffman. Mr. Hoffman’s birth date was 7th January, 1922. He is a veteran of World War II, United States Navy Pacific theatre. His current address is 63 Empire Circle, Cold Springs, Texas, 77331. The highest rank that he attained during World War II was that a Lieutenant Senior grade, United States Navy. I guess maybe that was the United States Naval Reserve.
RH: Naval Reserve, yeah. I didn’t make full lieutenant until later, when I was in the active Reserves. The highest rank I’d in the Navy, in the active duty part, was JD.
EW: While you mention that, did you continue your career in the Reserves, apparently?
RH: Yeah, I stayed in for a number of years. I wish I’d stayed in the whole bit, but—
EW: You didn’t get the retirement in the Naval Reserve—?
RH: No.
EW: —but you were a member of that for some years thereafter?
RH: Yes, uh-hunh (affirmative).
EW: Okay, why don’t you tell us just a little bit about what your life was like in those depression years prior to World War II?
RH: I guess a lot like most everybody else—my father ran a haberdashery store in Seattle, Washington, and finally he had to close it up. We had a sign on the door from the government that he had gone bankrupt. He lost his home and managed to find another one for us, and we went on our way. The interesting part being that we never knew we were poor.
EW: You shared that same fate with millions of other Americans.
RH: Absolutely, sure.
EW: That depression began in ’29. You would’ve been something like—what—8 years old.
RH: —7 years old, yeah.
EW: Then it extended on through the ‘30s.
RH: Yeah.
EW: Only with the advent of World War II did the country begin to come somewhat out of that long depression period. You mentioned that you area native of Seattle, Washington. I’m assuming you attended the public schools there and what have you. Why don’t you just sort of briefly discuss up to the point that you entered World War II in the Navy?
RH: (03:03) Yeah, I was born in Seattle and raised there until I was 15. The job that my father found, after the depression began to recede, took him to Milwaukee, and he moved the family there. While I was in Seattle, I had quite an acquaintance with the water. I’ve been what I call a water person all of my life. I had an older brother who built his first functional sailboat 12 feet long, when he was 14 years old, so he—kind of—introduced me to the ways of the water, and I’m sure that that’s the reason that I joined the Navy and I had the opportunity of going to war.
EW: I can assure you, that having been in Seattle just recently, that those interests still prevail out there. There are a lot of people that are really interested in being right there on the beautiful Puget Sound.
RH: Having had that background as a youngster, it helped me a lot when I got into training in the Navy that I had a lot of basic knowledge about how things worked on ships and boats and so on.
EW: You graduated from public schools there in Seattle?
RH: No, actually I went through 2 years in Seattle and then one year in Milwaukee, and I graduated from Evansville Township High School in Evansville, Illinois. I went to three high schools before it was over.
EW: You moved around a little bit like a lot of depression era people did.
RH: Yeah, the breadwinner went where the opportunity was.
EW: That’s exactly right, and it required a lot of willingness to do things that was not necessarily palatable. You did what you had to do back in that day and age.
RH: I think that had a lot to do with the attitude that all of us had when we went in the war too. It wasn’t really stoicism, but we were willing to accept whatever came our way. If it was hardship, it was hardship, and you did what you needed to do with it.
EW: That’s it.
RH: (04:57) Yeah. We both learned to be ingenious.
EW: Did you enlist or were you drafted?
RH: I think always of these situations like politicians who have been criticized because they got into this or that program and perhaps didn’t find their way into wartime service and so on, but governments have programs, and they made them out so that they can take the greatest advantage of the use of their nation at that time. One of those programs, when I happened along was called B-7.
EW: I’ve heard of it.
RH: It was designed so that those of us that were doing halfway decently in school,—and incidentally were born at the right time—could remain in school if we signed up with the Naval Reserve. They allowed us to finish our undergraduate education and get a degree, provided we were willing to go into training immediately thereafter with the notion that we would—if qualified, we could come out as officers. I just fit. I was born at the right time. I had parents that saw to it that I went to college. They didn’t provide, but they encouraged that kind of thing. It was a combination of my age and the fact that I had a higher education. They pointed me in the direction of being an officer.
EW: What college was that at the time?
RH: I went to Marquette University.
EW: Is that a parochial?
RH: It’s a Jesuit University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
EW: Right, yeah, it’s well-known. I’ve heard of Marquette on many occasions. I think one of their claims to fame was basketball.
RH: (06:43) They were big in basketball, but I went there when they were still playing football. (laughs)
EW: You’re dating yourself. You mentioned the B-7 program. I seem to recall it as a V-12 program. What was that—sort of—a progression of program?
RH: There was a B-12. There was a B-12, a B-5, and a B-7. I remember one of them had to do with airplanes in the Naval Air Force. Ours was surface ship duty. That was the basis for it. The V-12, I honestly can’t remember right now just what it was. I remember that there was one.
EW: Do you remember the Turner?
RH: Yeah, but I don’t remember just what group it focused on. It was all organized, so as we came on at the right time, they had places for us to go, and we went into training. In due time, we were turned out and put to work in some aspect of the Navy’s activities.
EW: When you first entered onto active duty, where did you go?
RH: I graduated from Marquette in 1943 in May, I guess. In August, I went to work in a war plant for a couple of months. Then I got called up. In August, I was sent to Columbia University, which was one of a number of Naval officers’ training schools.
EW: In New York City?
RH: In New York City, yeah, uh-hunh (affirmative). We had a 30-day period there as enlisted men, during which they culled the group a little bit. Then we went in. We were then named as midshipmen and had 3 more months, hence the 90-day wonder appellation that we had.
EW: Was that at Columbia, the 90-day wonder part of it also?
RH: Pardon me?
EW: Was that at Columbia also?
RH: (08:41) Oh, yes. The whole 4 months was there at Columbia.
EW: Okay, so really—and, of course, this is naval service is somewhat different. It’s a type of duty and what have you. You didn’t go through—and you were commissioned—so you didn’t really go through the typical boot camp—sort of—experience that a lot—?
RH: The closest we got to boot camp was during that first 30 days. We wore enlisted uniforms at that time. Of course, there was an extraneous athletic program that went with it, but no, we didn’t have the same experience as guys that went through boot camp.
EW: Not a lot of drilling and that sort of thing?
RH: There was drilling. Yeah, it was—kind of—interesting. There were two big dormitories. I understand they’re still there. One was Fernandez. The other one was Johnson, and between it was a great big field that turned out to be a perfect parade ground. Yeah, we did our share of marching, drilling with wooden makeshift guns and simulation guns, and that sort of thing. Yeah, we did a good bit of that.
EW: You did get the basic dose of military infantry.
RH: Yeah, I was on the seventh deck—as we used to call them then—of this particular building, which was a dormitory. We weren’t allowed to use elevators. We ran up and down and had very rigorous schedules, and so on. It was intense training.
EW: Oh, yeah, I’m sure it was at that particular time. What sort of instructors did you have? Do you remember any of those? Regular Navy—?
RH: Oh, yeah, I can even tell you some of their names, but it wouldn’t make any difference. They were, for the most part, guys that hadn’t been too long out of the school themselves, but for one reason or another, they were retained. They were ensigns and JGs. I remember one lieutenant particularly. It was—kind of—a game. We all knew the rules, and there were demerits, and you didn’t want to get caught. The instructors were not much older than we were, but they knew where they were in the thing, and we knew where they were too.
EW: You really didn’t have a lot of regular Navy personnel training at that time.
RH: No, this is Naval Reserve stuff, and as we go a little further into this, well, I think we’ll discover that the entire destroyer escort program, of which I became part, was a Naval Reserve operation, with a few exceptions.
EW: As I’ve already mentioned, you served in World War II. Where exactly did you go, following your completion of the OCS program?
RH: (11:17) Well, I was—I said to you earlier that I had some preliminary with things of the sea and water and whatnot. I surprised myself and everybody else. I did extremely well while I was there at OCS, and as a consequence, I was given a choice of a number of places to go for training. One of those choices was 6 months in Florida training as an anti-submarine worker specialist.
EW: ASW—they call it now.
RH: Yeah, so I jumped on that, and I was granted that.
EW: You went from Columbia—you were assigned to the ASW program.
RH: I had a couple of weeks off and went home to Milwaukee, and then reported down in Miami, where sub chaser training school—I guess it was.
EW: Okay and how long were you in training down there? Do you remember?
RH: Between there and some time in Key West, I think there was—well, let’s see, I got out in November. I was commissioned in November, and I went to the ship in about April, so it was all in between that time. It was 5 months, at least.
EW: November of ’43 to April ’44, thereabouts?
RH: Thereabouts when I was commissioned. It was—they kept us busy with this fairly sophisticated equipment and so on, but they didn’t make engineers out of us. We just learned to operate it.
EW: Upon completion of that, what was your MOS, or job assignment, more or less?
RH: (12:54) As I look back on it, it was a real well-coordinated program, and we just—kind of—flowed out of midshipman school into the anti-submarine warfare training process. Before we got out of that, we were already assigned to a nucleus crew. In this case, the ships that we went to were just our escorts, because while we were in the human assets—so to speak—we were being trained. They were building these destroyer escorts like crazy—some 563 of them—I guess—got built in a matter of a year and a half.
EW: Then they were turning those things out in a couple of days, I believe.
RH: Well, not quite, but it seemed like it.
EW: They were doing that with delivery ships—you know.
RH: Yeah, the destroyer escorts—I have seen the data on how long it took to put one together—maybe 4 or 5 months—something like that. There were a number of shipyards, including Orange down here in Texas and up in Carney. They were all around the country. They were turning these things out. The reason, of course, was to do something quickly about the German submarine warfare, which was taking a devastating toll on our shipping across the Atlantic at this point in the war.
EW: Yeah, and even in the Gulf of Mexico.
RH: Yeah, they were everywhere. During my training in Miami, I remember doing sentry duty on the beach—the Atlantic beaches there at night. We’d get assigned, and we’d have to walk the beaches. What we were doing was looking for lights out on the Atlantic.
EW: I know—I’ve seen maps of—for example—I was showing you Samuel Eliot Morison—one volume of his history of Naval operations World War II. There is a one-volume abridgement of that entitled Two-Ocean War, and it has—among many other illustrations—it has a map to show submarine U-Boat sinking along the coast—
RH: Sure.
EW: —the Eastern gulf coast of the United States and it’s absolutely amazing how many ships were sunk right within the sight of our shores.
RH: I really don’t think that the civilian population in the country was very much aware of that.
EW: Yeah, right off the mouth of the Mississippi River, for example, or right outside. I once met a guy that had been a radio officer on a merchant ship. He had received his training at one of the other merchant training schools—radio schools—I think up in the New York area. He related to me that the first ship he joined, they sailed—departed from Sandy Hook and were almost immediately torpedoed. Because of the urgency of the time—you know—sometimes training, once it’s completed, there should be aircrafts that didn’t take off or whatever, but there he was. He told me he was frantically reading the manual about how to operate the battery-operated transmitter, so he could transmit an SOS—just right off the New York harbor there.
RH: Yeah, I’m sure.
EW: Could you tell us a little bit—at this point, it might be an appropriate place here—about the destroyer escort. They’re smaller than a destroyer.
RH: (16:05) Yeah, I’d really like to. I learned a lot about them, much more in recent years than I ever knew when I was sailing on one. It was a well-thought through program to provide ships that were a little smaller than destroyers, but they were light on their feet, so to speak, and they were not heavily armed, as far as aircraft and surface warfare was concerned, but they had what was state of the art anti-submarine gear,—
EW: Sonar and etcetera, etcetera
RH: —which then was sonar and an array of about three different kinds of weapons for trying to blow these submarines under water.
EW: Depth charges and—
RH: Depth charges and a ahead-thrown gear that the little rocket things would send out an array of 30 or 40 of the small bombs, and they dropped in a circle over the submarine.
EW: Is that like the wire arrangement sometimes you see?
RH: A wire arrangement was depth charges. The depth charges were preset and exploded according to the depth setting that you put on them, and they were effective if you got close enough to the submarine, but they threw an awful lot of explosives over for the one time you get a submarine. The ahead-thrown—I’m saying ahead—a-h-e-a-d—thrown weapons were mounted on the foredeck, and then they were sent off in a pattern. They were much smaller—the charges were—and when they fell, they didn’t designate unless they hit the submarine. There was a real solid reason for that. In the first place, they were easier to build, and they didn’t cost as much. On the other hand, every time you add an explosion, you might as well quit pinging for the submarine, because there was so much turbulence in the water that you would get echoes back from the turbulence. The submarine could slip out of the way of the turbulence, and you’d lost them. If it didn’t blow up unless it hit them, you never had your search interrupted, and could generally keep pinging on the hull of the submarine and throw another barrage at him.
EW: That’s generally a forward-looking sort of a situation with sonar?
RH: (18:23) The sonar swept. The sonar gear was under the forward part of the ship, about a third of the way from the bow and stern, roughly.
EW: Clocking with dome arrangement, I guess, in a hole.
RH: We had a dome, actually, that extended down from the hull—from the keel of the ship, and when it was down there, it could go to 360 degrees.
EW: Really?
RH: What you did—yeah, in fact, that was the standard operating procedure was to cause that thing to swing from side to side, at least through 180 degrees as you were moving through the water.
EW: As you move forward, right.
RH: You’d have several of these destroyers, of course, working together. Their ping area would overlap and would have, in effect, a continuous search of a mile or more, and just sweep where you thought the submarine was going to be.
EW: Yes and the sonar could generally establish the depth at which the target was located, and that’s how you knew the sub was charted.
RH: (19:20) It was absolutely primitive compared to what we do now. At that time, it was pretty sophisticated. We had a pretty good idea of depth, yeah, although that could be affected by the warmth of the water and layers of different temperatures in the water and so on, but we had a fair idea of depth. We had a good idea of direction, because you’d hear the—and then even today, you hear of pinging, as far as our efforts to learn about the Doppler effect. We’d ping at one tone, and when it comes back, if the tone is higher, than the object is coming—you’re getting closer to it. If it is lower than you’re in a lengthening range and so on.
We knew where they were pretty well actually, as far as that direction was concerned. We could make a combination of soundings and find out what the track plotted, and then know just what their course of speed was and so on. Then your objective was to get your own ship headed a little bit ahead of them with enough elapsed time, so that when you threw your weapons over the bow, he would drive right into them when they got to his depth.
EW: Primarily, the destroyer escort would probably be the extreme outer fringe of a defensive formation for—say, for a task force.
RH: The escorts had an interesting career, because the early ones all went to the Atlantic. In fact, they are credited by historians today for eliminating the submarine threat. They worked in wolf packs with—what we called—CVEs that were little escort carriers. Everybody called then postage stamp carriers. There would be a CVE and cluster of destroyers. Of course, they would go out on their own, and find submarines and destroy them. The other thing they did was act as screens for the big convoys that were running back and forth across the Atlantic. About half way through the way—I guess—the submarines were conquered, with a few exceptions. We actually eliminated that as the dire threat that it was earlier in the war, so now, they had all these ships 306 feet long and pretty shallow. The idea was that torpedoes would go under us. They didn’t always, but that was the notion, and so we all got sent over to the Pacific. Well, I didn’t get into the active part of things until most of the Atlantic naval war was over, so I went directly to the Pacific.
EW: I wasn’t aware of that, so were actually involved in anti-submarine warfare in the Atlantic, prior to going to the Pacific?
RH: No, our ship wasn’t built in time. We didn’t get out until 1944, and the submarine threat was pretty well caught by that time.
EW: By that time, that had been pretty well done.
RH: We never went into the Atlantic. We were built at the Pacific coast at Best Steel yard in San Francisco, and we went directly from San Francisco into the Pacific. A lot of my experience—which was one 15-month war cruise—we called it—and then a second post-war cruise over to the orient. All of that occurred in the Pacific.
EW: You mentioned CVs and those anti-submarine war configurations. Those were small carrier-type aircraft, and they carried aircraft.
RH: (22:59) They were merchantman, but they weren’t.
EW: Were they?
RH: Yeah.
EW: What kind of aircraft did they have aboard?
RH: Well, they had only a handful to begin with, and I really can’t tell you precisely what they were, but—
EW: They are the ones that would fly out and—
RH: Yeah, and they were equipped to—if they could find a submarine, they were equipped to drop on it—torpedoes and so on.
EW: Or let you know—
RH: They also did search form. Subs, in those days, couldn’t stay underwater very long.
EW: Yeah, they were diesel electric.
RH: They were diesel electric, and they needed oxygen, so for most of the war, they had to surface at night. Also, they were extremely limited, as far as their speed under water. If they ran 8 knots under water, we were told that they could only run for an hour or more. If they ran at 3 knots, they run for maybe a half a day or so. That was part of the tactic for getting them, was to stay with them until they had exhausted their oxygen, and they had to surface. That is what our 3-inch guns were for was to shoot at them when they surfaced.
EW: Once they surfaced?
RH: (24:02) Yeah.
EW: A destroyer escort designated DE—I’ve always had the impression that those things were—you mentioned—like they were 305 feet long?
RH: Three hundred and six feet long—yeah—most of them were. The first ones were a little shorter than that in length.
EW: That is probably—what—three-quarters of the size of a DD destroyer?
RH: Fletcher class destroyers were 365 feet, as I recall.
EW: The same size?
RH: No, they were 60 feet longer.
EW: A little more heavily armed—I guess?
RH: Oh, yeah, totally. As ships grow in length, they grew exponentially in width and depth and weight and so on.
EW: With regard to armament and that sort of thing?
RH: Yes. Well, none of the destroyers, of course, had any armor on them. They were built to go fast and as fast as they could go, in any event, and they weren’t protected the way battleships were, that has 12-inch plates of steel on their sides and that sort of thing at the waterline—none of that. The destroyers were part of the surface warfare fleet. They were designed to go in and literally blow other ships out of the water, and hence their name. They had a long history of that.
EW: They were nimble.
RH: (25:26) They used the destroyer escort—I’m not sure why they hung the word destroyer on it, to be honest with you, because we didn’t have near the fire power that the destroyer did, and we didn’t have the speed. We did escort duty, and somehow or another we got the destroyer escort. We were under Des Pac, which was destroyer Pacific, as far as our role of command was concerned. We were the smallest major war vessel in the Navy at that time.
EW: —in the navy at that time?
RH: Yeah.
EW: Well—you know—I’ve read accounts of invasions, both in Europe, Italy, and particularly in the Pacific, where destroyers and DE’s could get in there close enough where they could offer close ground support from the main batteries.
RH: There was a certain amount of shore bombardment. The destroyers did that, because they were carrying—the Fletcher class and had five five-inch guns on them that were coordinated and had good fire control. They used them for shore bombardment extensively in the island hopping in the Pacific. The destroyer escorts didn’t have that kind of fire power.
EW: Once you completed your training in Florida, where did you go from there? I’m assuming it is San Francisco.
RH: They were building ships all around the country and at various bases. In our case, the one at Norfolk was gathering people together to form—what they called—nucleus crews. Before I ever got out of the training in Florida, they had already assigned me to a nucleus crew for the Destroyer Escort 643, which was the Damon Cummings. I went directly at another leave—a week or two—and then I went to Norfolk to join the men who were going to sail with me when the ship was commissioned. It’s interesting, I’ve read accounts of many of these destroyer escorts and got active with the historical escort sailor association, and they all tell us in one story, because the program was so well coordinated that it was—the steps were all the same.
If we were officers, we went through training—like Columbia or other schools. Notre Dame was doing it and a number of others. Then we went and got some specialized training, if you’re going to be in the gunnery gang or in the engineering group, whatnot—they sent you off to specialized schools. Then we found our way to the nucleus crew. There were about a hundred or so in that nucleus crew, and about—maybe—ten officers. We trained together out there—got to know each other. Then they all had the famous train trip from wherever they were training to the ship, which was a nightmare in everybody’s case.
EW: Tell me a little bit about that.
RH: (28:09) Well, they moved us around on—what we called—cattle cars. They weren’t much bigger than cattle cars, and they had bunks that were rigged taut-wise in them, and they were about three or four high. They were giving business to all the railroads. The one we took from the Atlantic coast to San Francisco—there were seven different railroads that got piece of the action on that, so we were sidelined all the time. It took us 5 days—I guess—to get across the United States. As an officer, I was only granted 4, so I lost a day of pay on that.
EW: You talk about a nucleus crew maybe of a hundred. What was the total crew common on that?
RH: When we went to sea, we had about—there were close to 220 of us—maybe 215.
EW: That many on a DE?
RH: Yeah, and it wasn’t bad. It was pretty good like that.
EW: It looks like that would be pretty crowded to me.
RH: All naval ships during World War II were crowded. They carried crews that were far in excess of what a merchantman would.
EW: Yeah, well, they have a combat mission, so there is going to be—
RH: Well, they had to stand three watches, and they had to be able to man everything all at once, so there was a lot of—if it was just the operation of the ship, we’d had done it with half that size or maybe less.
EW: Yeah, that’s what is interesting, because I’ve served on American flag merchant vessels. I was on the radio and then eventually an electronics officer. I’ve been on vessels as big as 212,000 dead weight ton—a huge ship—and we’ve got 21 men on there. Of course, it’s all a different mission and what have you.
RH: (29:52) Sure.
EW: These things were—like 1,000 feet long or thereabouts.
RH: Oh, sure.
EW: You’re talking about a 360—
RH: Yeah, most of that technology, the telemetry that made all of that possible, was not available back in those days, but the main thing is we had to have enough men to fight the ship.
EW: Yeah, a totally different mission. Anyway, I was also under the impression if we were aboard in Norfolk, right—?
RH: She wasn’t. The ship was in San Francisco. We were just trained there.
EW: You were trained at Norfolk, okay.
RH: Some training in Norfolk, yeah, and then we got put on this train, all hundred of us and spent 5 days in lousy traveling conditions—
EW: —on the cattle cars.
RH: —on the cattle cars and morale was lousy.
EW: I bet.
RH: There are some stories that go with that, but it is fun to think of them, but anyhow, we found our way out to Oakland. Then they put us in boats and took us across to San Francisco where the ship was close to being finished.
EW: You made an entire transcontinental flight—rather trip—on a cattle car that arrived in the San Francisco Bay area and joined you vessel out there.
RH: (30:59) A lot of the senior members of the crew—the chiefs who had a lot of experience—all but one or two of them, I guess, and all of the officers traveled independently over. I got the nod, because I was the junior officer, and so I got to be in charge of the train.
EW: How nice. With that experience you wouldn’t—
RH: (laughs) When we get together at these reunions, we have a great time talking about that train trip across the country.
EW: I’ve talked to other veterans with regard to the same thing. I was talking to an Eighth Air Force veteran, and he was placed in charge of a similar detail. During the course of that trip from X to Y there, he said, “A lot of them just disappeared.”
RH: All sorts of things happened.
EW: He had no way to control that, and then try to explain it when they got there. He thought he was going to end up court marshaled, but it worked out okay. You arrived in San Francisco. About when was that—along in the spring of ’44?
RH: Yeah, it was in the spring of 1944, and then we were there several weeks while the ship was completed. Then one day we all got onboard in our dress blues and white hats and had the commissioning ceremony. I still have the document at home listing all of us who were there at that commissioning at Bethlehem Steel shipyard. We took the ship out for the first time and did some basic maneuvering and then took her down to San Diego, where there was another facility which ran the shakedown crews, and we spent our time in shakedown down there, which is just what the name implies. We exercised the ship. We exercised the crew. There is a lot of basic training in it.
EW: Correct the malfunctions?
RH: Sure, anything that wasn’t done right in the shipyard, you could have a change to correct it.
EW: Right.
RH: (32:47) It seemed that that shakedown was several weeks.
EW: Yeah, I would say so, and then you’ve got to go back to the yard and try to get all of that straightened out.
RH: Right, and then we went to sea.
EW: Then you headed out. Did you go as part of a convoy or did you strike out on your own?
RH: We were sent to Hawaiian islands first, and we simply went by ourselves. The eastern Pacific—in other words—not anything much to be afraid of over there in that part of the world, so we sailed by ourselves to the Hawaiian islands—stopped there for a little while—picked up some more crew and some more officers.
EW: Did you—as a matter of safety—follow the wartime procedures zigzagging? Do you remember? Of course, you’ve got to ID—
RH: Now, we (laughs)—I don’t know whether I mentioned this while the camera was running or not, but most of these destroyers were manned at 98 percent by reserve personnel, including the officers. Most of the time, however, there was an Annapolis man as the skipper.
EW: Regular Navy?
RH: In our course, we had a regular Navy skipper, and we had a regular Navy exec. They both had gone to Annapolis—had left the Navy for awhile to pursue their careers, and then they were called back when the war occurred. Our particular skipper at that time was a nice guy. He was an advocacy lawyer by profession, but he was a by-the-book guy—a real stickler, so we did everything exactly right. We were the last ship to take our ties off after we got passed. All the other ships were going by with open collars, and we still had our black ties on.
EW: It sounds like your skipper might have been the Patton of the United States Navy.
RH: Well, he was a decent chap. He wasn’t a hard-nosed guy at all, but he was a by-the-book guy. The poor fellow had been a member of the crew of the WASP when it was sunk down at the Coral Sea. He was deadly fearful of submarines. Why they ever made Captain Milliken the skipper of an anti-submarine vessel I’ll never know but—
EW: He definitely had had experience with—
RH: (35:07) Yeah, and he was mortally afraid of them. Up in Okinawa—that’s where we were sent—bless his heart—we were in the middle of kamikaze attacks. At that time I was acting as combat information center officer. That was my battle station, and I had voice-powered phones that were connected to his. His was on the bridge above me. I’d said, “Captain, we’ve got a bogie coming in at such-and-such a bearing and such-and-such a range.” I can still remember him saying, “Damn it, Hoffman, forget the kamikazes.” Where are the submarines?”
EW: Where are the submarines?
RH: “Where are the submarines?” yeah.
EW: He was obsessed.
RH: Yeah.
EW: He was the Captain Queeg.
RH: Well, he was a nice guy. He wasn’t a Captain Queeg. He was a good fellow. He just had had a terrible experience. He was in the water a long time before he was rescued after the submarine sunk him down there.
EW: Yes, and that was a very definite and distinct thread. I don’t know what the figures are, with regard to tonnage subs, but I know those Japanese submarines sunk awful lot of American tonnage, including warships during the course of the war.
RH: We were vulnerable to them up there in that area, but there weren’t too many of them left. That was the fortunate thing about our experience.
EW: Well, then from Hawaii you proceeded where?
RH: We had various assignments, either patrolling shipping lanes or convoying ships back and forth. We spent a number of months in the central and south Pacific. Just I often think, during those months, the Pacific Ocean had no other side, as far as we were concerned. We just spent our time among these islands out there.
EW: Was that just generally by yourself, on your own, or was that in conjuncture with other vessels?
RH: (36:55) Sometimes we would work with other ships in the division. There were six ships in the division, arranging from the 639 through the 644—I guess. Anyhow—or whatever that comes out to—but most of our time—or a large part of it—we were just operating by ourselves.
EW: —there among those islands. I guess you were looking for some possible submarine presence.
RH: Yeah, we did that all the time. We always pinged for submarines, even when we were just running.
EW: Then, finally as the war began to reach its final phases, how about the Okinawa campaign? Did you have anything to do with the Hiroshima campaign?
RH: No, our war was Okinawa. After we had done this duty in the Central Pacific, they began the marshal the armada that went to Okinawa. Armada is the right word. There were thousands of ships involved in that thing.
EW: Like Task Force 58 or something?
RH: Well, much, much more than that. At the end, to pull that thing together, we found ourselves getting into anti-aircraft training, and we got buzzed by our own aircraft to show us what it was like. We wouldn’t have had a prayer of shooting one of those guys down. One would come in over the bow, and we get everything aimed at him. The next thing, somebody will holler, “Look over your port quarter,” and here comes another one, and nothing was aimed at him. We realized we weren’t really anti-aircraft.
EW: You weren’t really capable. I guess probably when you finally got there though, the fact that—and I guess the Japanese kamikaze capability was somewhat limited. Also, generally—obviously, not always—they were after those carriers more than anything else.
RH: (38:45) No, they were after the destroyers.
EW: Really?
RH: Yeah.
EW: Well, I would be the defense.
RH: There were two lines of defense. When all the ships were in where your father was, I believe. You said, there at Bunker Bay, they were discharging personnel and material on the beach to support the war that was going on—and a horrible war on the island. We had an inner ring of destroyer escorts, which were there, presumably, to try to catch a submarine that might try to come in, but more practically, it was anti-aircraft. Then there was an outer ring, and that was manned largely by the destroyers.
EW: Pickets, I think they were called.
RH: Picket ships—they were called, exactly. We had the two rings that went out—like semicircles to protect that harbor—thousands of ships literally involved in the harbor there—just milling around, waiting to be attacked. The Japanese focused more on the destroyers, because the destroyers were more likely to shoot them. Our anti-aircraft—we didn’t have very good fire control, for example. We had a lot of really diligent fellows firing those guns, but they didn’t have much help on the technical side really.
EW: You were actually in the invasion armada?
RH: We spent more time than any of the six ships of our division up there at Okinawa. We were there for 30 days from the night of the invasion, which was the night before Easter which happened to be April Fool’s Day, until 30 days after that. We then were sent to escort a damaged cruiser—a cruiser that had been struck by a kamikaze.
EW: They called it—I guess it was called “Ulithi Mog Mog,” I’ve heard him refer to it.
RH: Well, there was a town on it or something—I think—called Mog Mog. Yeah, there was. Then we turned around and went back up for another 15 days, so we had 45 days under those kamikaze attacks up there, more than any of our other ships, because we—and there were only two of us that weren’t hit.
EW: Out of your division?
RH: Most war ships had some—kind of—now, they weren’t sunk, but they had some—kind of—damage. We didn’t get any damage. We called ourselves a lucky ship.
EW: Could you comment just a little bit about what viewers that might be looking at this in the future that really don’t know what kamikazes were?
RH: (41:16) Oh, yeah. In this day and time, of course, we think about what is going on in Iraq and then Israel and the suicides over there. In many respects, it was the same attitude by the people that were running things. They recruited and trained a bunch of pilots and used the last of their aircraft on this desperation mission. We were lead to believe that these young men were brought out in the morning and given their last cup of Saki and sent to their aircraft with only enough gas to get one way, and that was from Japan, where they were down to Okinawa, where we were. Their mission was simply to get a ship in the sites of their aircraft and to drive the aircraft into it.
EW: They were loaded with explosives?
RH: Yeah, sure, but they were not the only ones. We had—well, I’ll put it this way. They had suicide version of virtually every kind of weapon you could think of. They had those submarines that they—what they did was take a weapon, make it large enough to put a human in. The human drove the thing, because they didn’t have computers to drive it—like we do today. The human brain was the control on that particular weapon, so they flew in things—like I saw the picture of the Baka Braun they showed me here earlier. They had suicide small boats—speed boats, we’d call them. They would have swimmers. They would drag a mine up against the hull of your ship and designate it.
EW: Just total fanaticism?
RH: Oh, yeah. Just before the war ended, they actually had some aircraft they built out of wood and fabric that only went about 120 miles and hour. They put explosives in the nose of those and sent a few of them down.
EW: Okay, Dick, let me interrupt you for a moment here. I noticed you’re—is this light bothering you and you’d like to stop and take a break?
RH: No, I’m fine. It’s in my eyes, but—
EW: Okay, I’m afraid that it might be irritating to you. We can certainly take a break at any time you wish for a drink of water or whatever.
RH: (43:39) You be the judge. I’m fine.
EW: This is not that formal, by any means. Tell us a little bit about the kamikaze attacks that you experienced.
RH: They came in waves.
EW: Squadrons of them?
RH: Yeah, they’d send a whole bunch of them down. Their strategy seemed to be to send a few isolated aircraft down at night. You have to visualize this thing as this great big open harbor alongside the central part of the island, and all of that harbor was full of ships—all kinds of ships.
EW: That’s like that picture in the Morison book that I showed you—wall-to-wall ships.
RH: Yeah, it showed how close together they were. They got flares on us and lit us up. The ships were still underway, and when we got flares on us, we would make smoke. We all had smoke generators on the sterns of ships, and so we would cover the harbor with smoke. Then we couldn’t see each other. We would mill around at 3 or 4 knots all night long. I happened to be in the middle of that, because I was the command of information center officer, and my job was to interpret the radar, figure out where the closest ships were going and what speed they were traveling and tell the skipper what to do. We did that for hours at night, just avoiding collisions with our own ships.
EW: A lot of those kamikaze attacks were at night under a lot of flares?
RH: No, they weren’t. They didn’t use the kamikazes at night. They just kept us up all night. Then at dawn, you could expect a wave of kamikaze aircraft.
EW: That’s right, you said—
RH: (45:31) They would come sweeping down from the north right over the harbor.
EW: Yeah, you said early noon and then later in the afternoon.
RH: Most of the times, there was a significant wave of them at dawn and again at dusk, for obvious reasons. The sun gets in your eyes and that sort of thing. At noon, they would send other aircraft in, not necessarily kamikaze.
EW: You had mentioned prior, when we were talking before this interview began that the flares were really just irritants to keep you awake.
RH: I think what they wanted to do was keep us awake all night, and they succeeded, because we needed to make smoke, and that meant we had to all really get on the alert to keep from running into each other.
EW: Exactly. Yeah, I misunderstood you there.
RH: Well, and I didn’t make it that clear really.
EW: All the pictures I’ve ever seen,—and I’ve seen a lot of pictures of kamikaze attacks—but they were made during the day. There are some very dramatic—and they say you tend to see the same ones over and over again. There were literally thousands of attacks.
RH: When they came in and they broke formation, then it was really total chaos, because they had no pattern—like an ordinary attack aircraft. You could anticipate what a torpedo bomber was going to do, or you could anticipate what a fighter plane was going to do, but these guys, you never knew what they were going to do. They just would peel and try to find something to run into, so it was total chaos. I have give credit where credit is due. We had a sometimes-effective four-barrel automatic gun on the ship. It was a 1.1, and that was the gun that shot down our kamikaze, as we call it.
EW: You got one?
RH: We got one, yeah. It attacked us, and we were able to shoot it down before it hit us. The reason I like to tell the story is, because with all of us guys with all of our specialized training, the fellow that was in charge of the gun crew was our supply officer—Jim Wood. Bless his heart, I got an email from him just the other day. He was in charge of that gun, and he saw the thing disappear into a cloud. He told the guys on the crew, he said, “Watch that cloud. When it comes out, don’t wait for me, you just open fire.”
EW: You said was a quad-barrel? Was it a 40-millimeter?
RH: (48:00) No, it wasn’t. The 40s were pretty reliable guns.
EW: Is that—like a compound gun?
RH: Yes, sort of. It was four barrel. I’ve forgotten. I think it was a broker’s gun.
EW: It had like a muzzle—like a funnel—maybe that’s the feed or something like that?
RH: They had the feed V-shaped—
EW: —for the ammo.
RH: —for the ammo, yeah. You had to feed all four of these barrels. The about it is that it was very erratic. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t work. We weren’t real happy to have it on our ship. We’d rather had the 40.
EW: Then you had that 20 millimeter?
RH: Oh, we had a bunch of 20s.
EW: Those things probably fired explosives. You know—that was the primary weapon on a lot of those German fighter planes. They carried those 20s.
RH: They packed a wallop.
EW: Oh, they fired explosive shell. They would explode upon contact.
RH: (48:54) You could see them when they exploded at the end of their trajectory. My battle station was inside, so I couldn’t see the combat. I didn’t see the kamikaze that attacked us, but I used to judge the degree of peril by the—kind of—guns we were firing. If we fired the 3-inch I didn’t worry.
EW: They were way off.
RH: They were way off, and we weren’t going to hit them anyhow, and if that 1.1 starting going then I thought, “Uh-oh, something is headed our way.” Then, when the 20s began, I began to say, “There’s really something on deck.”
EW: You probably even had some 50s.
RH: Well, the 50s were the last resort—a couple of 50s up on the bridge. You’d hear those go off— (laughs)
EW: —and that was it. You mentioned picking up a kamikaze’s body in the water?
RH: Yeah, we were out on patrol, and somebody spotted this body, and we were given orders to go over and pick the body up. I was up on the bridge at the time, but by the time they got him on the quarter deck, I was down there to see what was going on, but couldn’t see what was going on. All of us—you know—had the same reaction, “This is just another young kid that got busted to duty.”
EW: He was just a young Japanese boy, more or less?
RH: Yeah, we’ve heard all of the legions about them, but the only part of it that really seemed to be accurate was that he was indeed dressed in black and had a black uniform on.
EW: Maybe the band around his fore—maybe not in the water.
RH: I remember the band.
EW: Well, you remember. You’ve seen pictures of them where they have some sort of prayer band or symbolic band around their head.
RH: When he started out, I’m sure that he did.
EW: He had a picture of a young girl, you said, in his wallet?
RH: Yeah, the thing that we remarked at, when we went through his wallet, why it could’ve been anybody—any American guy’s wallet too. There was a picture of a young woman in there that clearly, he was just another guy that got caught up in the horror of it all.
EW: —and had been trained in that sort of activity and in the service of the emperor.
RH: He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, I guess, and just got swept up in that thing. Everything was desperation at the end of the war for the Japanese. They were running out of everything—all their aircraft. Their Navy was virtually gone, which, of course, brings us to the Amato story. I don’t know whether you want to talk about it or not.
EW: Did you see that—the armada?
RH: (52:15) No, I didn’t see it.
EW: I might mention, before you comment, is that is the last battleship that the Japanese built. It was the largest in the world. (Unintelligible.)
RH: It was the greatest ship they had. The way we got involved in it, one afternoon, I was handed a decoded message, and I read it and gulped a couple of times, because we were told that the Amato, with a task group of—I think it was—three or four cruisers and maybe half a dozen or more destroyers—was headed down our way. It had left Japan, and the notion was that it was going to be a super suicide mission. They were just going to come into that harbor where all those thousands of ships were, and shoot and anything until they got killed.
EW: They had huge guns—16-inch guns.
RH: Oh, yeah, they were 16-inch guns on the armada, I understand. I went to bed that nights, and that was one of the few nights that I was really fearful. I think I mentioned once before to you that a lot of our fear was unfounded, because in this case, as it will appear, it was unfounded. When I hit the sack that night, I didn’t do much sleeping, because all I could think of was that I was going to be awakened by the tumult of the guns and everything breaking loose in the harbor at dawn. What the people who sent us the message didn’t bother to tell us, is that we had a major taskforce of our own up there—one of the main carrier taskforce—and it was in between Okinawa and Japan. Indeed they went over and intercepted the Armada, and sank her and sank the cruisers and a few of the destroyers.
EW: That pretty well ended the Japanese naval trip.
RH: (53:03) That was it. We were always mad at the guy that sent that message out that afternoon, that he didn’t even tell us that we had our own people up there that were going to attack them.
EW: When the war ended, you were in Okinawa?
RH: Yeah, I was in Okinawa when the bomb dropped. Then we had the transition back into peacetime steaming when none of us wanted to turn the lights on at night because we didn’t trust the Japanese.
EW: Did you proceed to the home islands or—?
RH: Yeah, we got to go up there. We went into Tokyo Bay about a week after the signing of it.
EW: Which is the twelfth of September or something like that?
RH: Thereabouts, yeah. I’ve forgotten the exact date. The thing that made me mad is I had the flu, and I only got a couple of days onshore. They were smart enough to tell us not to wear our side arms when we went onshore, but it was still an extremely interesting experience. Obviously, the great areas—blocks and blocks and blocks were nothing but chimneys were standing and so on, where our big bombs had done that. It took a moment to realize that it was once populated there. That was in Tokyo.
EW: Did you encounter any hostilities from civilians you encountered?
RH: No, that’s the thing about the discipline in that—kind of—a government. The people—we had been advised not to try to make any real contacts or anything, but we walked through the streets, and there would be little groups of people standing on the street corner. Then we were particularly concerned for it. The children were just the children of the world. They were just like our children. They came up and they wanted chum gum.
EW: Already?
RH: Yeah.
EW: Within days?
RH: They’d hang around us begging, with a big grin on their face—just like all of our children—similar.
EW: Oriental children are beautiful children—all of them.
RH: (54:56) You had to—there was so much to comprehend in seeing a nation that had been pummeled like that that had been with the tremendous power of our military.
EW: Our military capabilities and what have you—I’ll tell you. Then I guess you—did you proceed back to the—?
RH: We got sent back, yeah, and we broke out our homecoming pennant, which you’re probably familiar with. It was about two-thirds the length of the ship, flying on the masthead. Everybody cheers when you go by.
EW: Did you go by San Francisco?
RH: We went back to Seattle and went into Bremerton there for an overhaul.
EW: That’s where my dad returned, to Bremerton.
RH: Uh-hunh (affirmative). Well, we were in one of the big grading docks, along with three other ships.
EW: Somewhere along there is my dad’s sea bag with a bunch of Japanese armament that he was bringing. I guess they were told to get rid of that stuff. He said he just dumped it into Puget Sound. He got home with a couple of burial vases. Okinawa is just—
RH: —riddled with caves.
EW: Yeah, well, that and these two burial things. They have these little urns.
RH: (56:09) That’s where the kings were—yeah, a lot of them.
EW: The only thing I have from his World War II service is a lot of photographs of Okinawa during that time, are those two burial urns. I’m going to pass those on to our children or museum or whatever is appropriate.
RH: I suppose the museums would be anxious to have them. I was able to get a cup and saucer from the officer’s club of the naval base in Tsingtao. They were quite delicate, compared with the crockery we had onboard our ships and our good steady stuff.
EW: Just briefly, Dick, let me ask you. You know—you spent all that time aboard this vessel without being able to get ashore. How did you handle that? Did it work out all right for you? Was the food good?
RH: Oh you mean—our regular, while we were cruising?
EW: Oh, yeah, life onboard.
RH: That’s a good question. There are two aspects in naval service, and one of them is running the ship and the other one is fighting it. I found running the ship—I mean—when we were devoting our time to operating the ship, I found that quite interesting and enjoyed it thoroughly.
EW: You became the executive officer?
RH: After we left—for awhile we were in Bremerton. The exec was sent back home, and he named me—I guess. I think he is the one who counseled it. Then I became the exec. I got back off leave, and I was the exec. I was part of the second crews.
EW: With the combat phase, you were a combat information center?
RH: Well, during the first cruise, the 15-month cruise—the war cruise you could call it—I had a variety of duties. They were in communications and—
EW: Yeah, you didn’t have just one duty on any naval vessel.
RH: (57:58) No, and I was originally the anti-submarine warfare officer. I was the guy that they looked to run the attacks on submarines. Even though I was the junior officer onboard, that gave me a certain amount of clout in the thing. I had all kinds of collateral duties and went on up through the communications department of the division.
EW: When you returned to the States, how long was it before you were relieved from active duty?
RH: Well, after I became exec, we made another cruise out to the orient—a post-war cruise. We went down to Vietnam or what was then PRC, China. We were serving as a flagship for—are you running out of time?
EW: No, go ahead.
RH: —where our mission was to provide a place for this trapper who was in charge of an armada, a flotilla of LSTs. Most of the people in the United States didn’t know it, but immediately after the war, of course, we went down to south China and brought out of the thousands and thousands of Chinese nationalist groups up the coast and put them in a sink tower to fight the Communists. That had already started, and we happened to be the flagship for the guy that was running that Potella of Elestege, so we went down to the French end of China. Of course, it’s another story, but it was a very interesting part of things.
EW: Yeah, and of course, the Communists eventually—by 1949—had the trial and taken over China. They came to China.
RH: After several months over there, my relief showed up, and I was transferred off ship. I came back on a transport.
EW: Yeah, we are drawing to a close here, so let me just ask you very briefly to state what your career was, basically after the war. I know you became a lawyer, so apparently you—
RH: Well, I stayed in law, and I was admitted to the bar in Wisconsin, but people ask about what the effect of the war years were on you. About the only thing it really did for me was delay my entry into the business world. By the time I got out of law school, there were two or three waves of brand new lawyers who had been turned out. All of the firms were all loaded up. They wouldn’t even talk to you if you weren’t from the Ivy league. That’s part of that, so I went into general business and did a variety of things. My main emphasis, if I may say so, was just to raise a family, and that’s what we did.
EW: Okay, Dick, I think we’re going to wrap it up here. It looks like we’ve come to the end of this tape. On behalf of the Library of Congress, I’d like to thank you very much, and personally I’d like to thank you very much for your World War II service. You have my gratitude and certainly my respect. Thank you very much.
RH: Thank you. I enjoyed it.
EW: Great.